Beck's cognitive theory of depression has achieved considerable prominence but unfortunately it is quite imprecise; the proposed reserarch is based on an integration of Beck's theory and Anderson and Bower's more explicit theory of recall and recognition performance. Three studies are to be performed. The first attempts to demonstrate the existence of selective memory effects and the second and third investigate the roles of encoding and retrieval processes in selective memory. The first study will compare depressed, formerly depressed, phobic, and nondepressed subjects' memories for positive and negative self-descriptive adjectives. Subjects' memories will be assessed either immediately after they have selected the self-descriptive adjectives or after a delay of several days. Compared to the other groups, the depressed subjects are expected to recall correctly more negative adjectives, to produce more intrusions in recall of negative adjectives, and to produce more false alarms in recognition tests for negative adjectives. Results opposite to these are expected for positive adjectives. All the effects are expected to be stronger in the delayed testing groups. In the second study, depressed and nondepressed subjects will again select self-descriptive adjectives. Half of each group will then be randomly assigned to an elaborated endocing condition in which they will be asked to remember an incident from their lives which is associated with each adjective. Selective memory effects are expected to be reduced in the elaborated encoding condition. In the third study, depressed and nondepressed subjects will be randomly assigned to receive Velten's elation, neutral, or depression mood manipulations prior to the memory tests for the self-descriptive adjectives. The elation condition should improve depressives' memories for engative adjectives. In summary, the proposed research will attempt to 1) demonstrate selective memory in depression and 2) investigate the roles of encoding and retrieval processes. More generally, it will demonstrate the value of integrating Beck's theory with an explicit model of cognitive processes.